Blog Comments & Posts

WOW. Just...wow. Very comprehensive, very informative, very, VERY useful. Thanks so much for this post, Phil - you've definitely gone above and beyond answering any of the questions I still had lingering about hosting video content for SEO purposes. This has become my new Bible.

It does take a good amount of time to build up your reputation and profile on any social networking site. I think trying to do it that way with dozens of sites would take a lot of work that could be better spent elsewhere, particularly if you are doing it just for the sake of building your profile and intend on abandoning it.

Sticking with the safe bets is probably the way to go. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and maybe some industry specific sites.

I like the analogy. The only thing I would change is the PageRank car is more like my old beater truck: it tells you what gear you're in, but the knob on the shifter is twisted so it doesn't REALLY tell you what gear you're in. If you try shifting based on it, you'll end up stalling all the time.

If you try using PageRank as a metric, you're going to end up killing the car.

I wholeheartedly agree to this principle. Clients are most likely already being bombarded with metrics, data, numbers, and graphs they don't really understand. If you can't directly translate a value like PageRank into a KPI for the client, ignore it. Make sure they know how outdated it really is.

I notice you didn't mention article marketing. Is the time spent writing articles worth the link juice you get from article submission sites? i know that there are only about a half-a-dozen article directories, at that most, that are worth submitting to, and that Google may devalue or ignore submissions that contain duplicate content.

Also: What's your opinion of posting answers with a couple relevant links to your own site on Yedda.com and Answerbag. When I first discovered them, I thought I had struck gold -- from an SEO standpoint, but the Page Rank of the pages on which you post are usually '0' or '1'.

Awesome post. Link building is one of the things I dislike the most about SEO :) But it's such a huge part, that any SEO not devoting a lot of study and practice to it most likely isn't going to get the job done.

I have two quick ideas to add to this. First is blekko.com - if you haven't heard of it, it's a new search engine startup that is still in private beta. But it's pretty easy to get an invite at this point. It operates around slashtags. They are predefined and user created search modifications that allow you to search only sites that you want to search. It's a lot like creating a shortcut for using the "site:" operator on multiple sites. An awesome trick is that you can do inverse slashtags by adding the "!" operator in front of it. That means you can search everything but the sites in that slash tag - getting rid of a lot of the sites you know won't link out. About.com, Wiki, etc. This clears out a lot of results you don't want to see pretty easily.

Oh, and their results vary from Google's a lot. That means there are sites on top that probably don't get very many link requests and will be more open to them. Sorry for the shameless plug, but I think Blekko is pretty cool.

Finally, don't be afraid to get customers to link to you or mention you in the social universe (socioverse?). This can be a HUGE source of links. Customers already give you some amount of trust, so they're pretty likely to throw a link your way - especially if there's something in it for them (Google never says not to reward a customer for linking to you, give them 5% off or a free t-shirt).

I really like the idea of boiling down SEO to mathematical concepts when possible, as I'm a real logical and deductive person. I imagine the majority of people that really love this LDA tool are the ones that come from development or math backgrounds, where those that think it doesn't change anything are more of a journalist and designer background. I could be wrong though, I'm basing that off just a few opinions I've seen.

Anyway, there are a lot of people saying "this won't change how I write anything" and others claiming "backlinks are still the most important factor". I see two underlying questions that have yet to be really answered. Most likely they will be over time.

1) What makes this different than any other SEO "fad"?

2) How does this change what I am doing or need to do?

Only time and implementation will adequately answer the first question. Although it is doubtful that everyone will ever be satisfied by the answer, even if it shows some concrete evidence. The difference is this is based off mathematical analysis rather than "gut instinct" and "quaint observations". It's not that working off instinct and observations (some would call this experience) is a bad thing. It's just a different way of doing things. Some will prefer basing their actions on statistical principles and others on experience.

We have to wait to see if it's different than other fads. If people implementing it begin to show results, it might begin to calm down some skeptics. I think the bigger question is how we are supposed to use this information. Right now it does nothing other than reinforce what we've known all along - writing good quality content is an important aspect of SEO.

That's not game changing. If I write a well crafted article about Star Trek, it's most likely going to have a high LDA for "star trek". If I write a gimmicked article and don't really know what I'm talking about (e.g. who is Captain Kirk and Spock and the Gorn and Orion slave girls...), it probably won't.

There are probably uses for this tool that we have yet to discover or understand. The biggest potential use for it that I see is the inverse: I submit my document and you tell me what it's about based on your LDA model. Then I can check my Star Trek article, and your LDA tool might say, "hey, I see where you're getting at on the Star Trek front, but it sounds more like you're talking about sickly looking enslaved women, you should shy away from the Orion slave girls and toss in a few more references to Kirk and maybe the Enterprise." That's useful.

As of right now, yeah, it doesn't change how most people do things. Unless they were writing low quality articles. The tool is still in the Labs, after all.

This post published the same day as Dr. Pete's CRO post in the main blog. Coincidence? Doubtful.

I think anyone serious about conversion rate optimization needs to consider some mouse-tracking, in addition to some of the other user testing Dr. Pete mentioned. In response to mdahamilton82, mouse-tracking is definitely not perfect and there are going to be variations. But it's the best affordable alternative to expensive eye-tracking studies. The truth is, most people "look" with their mouse cursor - particularly when they are reading text.

Even if you don't buy into it as an indication of "line of vision", there are other important it may indicate. David mentioned the specific example of an image that received 3,000 clicks a month from visitors thinking it would be a link. That's a perfect case where mouse tracking helps when eye tracking might not.

Another great example of mouse tracking functionality: dropdown/flyout navigation. It may be that a lot of your visitors are hovering over a certain navigation link a lot, but not finding what they want in the flyout sub-menu.

Great point about consumers expecting a recognizable image. If they're in the stage where they are comparing your product, shopping around, then it is very likely they are finding the particular product based on image and not reading descriptions at all. (With the exception of things like a laptop, where many models look alike.)

Also, consumers LOVE seeing products in action. Even if you can't afford the money or time to produce videos for everything, you can show images. Show the Five Pens being held in hand and written with. Show what you've written looks like.

Convincing clients to spend the time or money to make their product database unique is one of the biggest hurdles I've come across with ecommerce. But the benefits are huge.

For B) Crawl Depth Analysis - this is great info and something I've wanted for awhile, but it is only useful if it goes beyond your bot's crawling. Such as:

1) Analyzing site logs to see how many of those URLs Google and Bing crawled.
2) Analyzing search engine results to see how many of those URLs are actually indexed
3) Combining with Analytics to determine, "pages 4 clicks away brought in 2,000 visitors from 1,500 keywords", "pages 3 clicks away brought in 4,000 visitors from these 1,400 keywords", etc.

If, in your example, it is only how many URLs your bot has seen vs. crawled, that's not incredibly useful information (even though your bot crawls similarly to the search engines).

Make a similar graph based on your referrer to keep tabs on search traffic, referral, and direct (maybe your direct traffic has gone down while search traffic has gone up, and you don't realize it), or if you have some large numbers from particular referral sites use that.

Make a graph to see which pages are bringing traffic to the site (not pageviews, but them acting as a landing page - not sure how easy this one will be to set up).

Track your top 5 or 10 keyword traffic over the weeks to see how they're performing and how they correlate with your rankings.

This is great stuff. I'm the biggest advocate of benchmarking. It's a shame there isn't an easier way to perform competitive benchmarking. However, with a little elbow grease, you can find a goldmine of valuable information by doing some introspective benchmarking.

Just a few quick tips I find useful.

Perform traffic source benchmarking in this same way. Break it down into direct, referral, by search engine, and break down referral into any significan referrers (if you have any). For instance, one of our e-commerce sites saw a relatively large spike in traffic around July 4th. By looking at this graph we're able to tell it was entirely due to direct traffic - a seasonal effect of return customers.

For e-commerce sites (and probably others), compare pageviews for your top level category pages, but also include pageviews to all of their content. If your category is category20.html, and everything inside it is in /category20/, compare all of these together on a chart. Being able to see that your Plastic Ear Tags page gets twice as many visits as your Metal Ear Tags page is good info. But if all the pages in the Metal Ear Tags category get 3 times as many pageviews as everything in the Plastic Ear Tags section, this is actionable information.